Basingstoke History: Life before the fire in Winchester Street

About 130 years ago, 19 to 21 Winchester Street was just a garden, which reached up to Southern Road.

Then, John Edney, who had a general dealer’s shop in Market Place, opened up two house-furnisher’s businesses, one in Church Street and the other in Winchester Street.

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The Winchester Street premises were built after he had acquired land on which a small surgery was adjoined to.

Both were built on and the result was a furniture showroom which Thomas Burberry later acquired as a warehouse in 1907 when Mr Edney moved to new premises in Winton Square.

Thomas Burberry's warehouse in Winchester Street (Image: Newsquest)

Mr Burberry had opened a large “Emporium” store opposite the warehouse in 1906 to replace his shop that was burned down the previous year.

His new store sold household goods and other stock, and he needed somewhere to keep the many items prior to selling them in his store, and the warehouse opposite was ideal.

In 1914 Mr Burberry sold his business to Edgar Lanham and this included the warehouse, but the latter was not required by 1930 so it became empty until Marks & Spencer took over the site for the construction of its local store, which opened in 1934.

The firm was there until 1981 when the store opened in the second phase of the new shopping centre. From then on, the Winchester Street building was used by the Marley DIY firm, then as the Furniture Factory.

In the early morning of September 11, 1984, a solitary figure was seen to wander along Winchester Street with a bottle in his hand, then, as he passed the Furniture Factory windows, he lit a piece of material which protruded out of the top of the bottle and threw it through the window.

The result was a massive fire that quickly consumed the furniture inside the lower part of the shop and then the flames spread upwards.

Firemen fighting the fire at the Furniture Factory in Winchester Street, Basingstoke, in 1984 (Image: Newsquest)

The Furniture Factory in Winchester Street after a fire in 1984. (Image: Newsquest)

A couple of people who lived upstairs managed to escape out of the back of the building, while people nearby rang for the fire service.

The police closed the street off and the fire was quickly got under control by the fire brigade. The fire completely gutted the building and it was later demolished for safety reasons.

During the following months, the site was cleared and arrangements were made for the construction of premises for the Bank of Scotland, which was later built and is still in business.

The right side of the bank was built across the site of a hairdressers shop called Miller and Miller, which was established there in 1924 after being in Church Street for some years, but it closed down in 1960 and the shop was empty at the time of the 1984 fire.

Basingstoke has suffered a vast amount of destructive fires over the centuries, one of the first being in September 1601, when it was recorded some 14 fine houses were burned down.

That fire happened when Queen Elizabeth I was visiting Old Basing and she saw the smoke rising from the town. Then, in 1655, Worting village church and rectory were among several buildings that were burned down and, in the following year, Basingstoke’s town centre, with its Mote Hall, was destroyed.

Winchester Street before Marks & Spencer arrived (Image: Newsquest)

After that fire it seems as if the residents were more careful, for no serious incidents occurred in the town until the mid-19th century.

At Hurstbourne Priors, the paper mill was destroyed by fire in July 1846, along with four houses (occupied by mill workers). The mill had been in operation since the 1660s.

In 1864, the “Flowerpots” tavern, in Hackwood Road, was burned down and, in August 1871, the Hobb’s Iron Works foundry, in lower Wote Street, caught fire and there were fears that the boiler might explode, but the flames were quickly put out by the Basingstoke Fire Brigade, which had been formed in 1869.

Their efforts were called upon again in 1876 in another serious fire, this time at the Basingstoke Workhouse, in Basing Road, in June that year. By then there were 24 firemen on the force.

During the following years more fires occurred, due to the increase in the size of the town in both population and buildings.

By the 20th century the use of a steam engine and horses to put fires out had been swept aside in 1913 by the opening of a fire station in Brook Street (now the site of Churchill Way) and the use of motorised fire engines.

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The list of serious fires during that part of the 20th century would fill a book, let alone those that have happened in Basingstoke since then.

We must be grateful that we now have an efficient fire service in our community, for no more do we have to wait for the steam engine to be pushed out of the cellar of the Corn

Exchange, in upper Wote Street, and hitched up to two horses that had been ridden up from a field near the railway station, as they did just over a century ago.